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The case had been, in Mulder's professional estimation, a spectacular waste of everyone's time.
Kersh had dropped the file with the particular satisfaction of a man who had found a creative use for a problem. Cattle mutilation, Brewster County, Texas. Sheriff's department openly contemptuous of federal involvement.
Mulder had called it a working vacation. Scully had called it a lot of other things.
Now it was the last day. The case was closed, mundanely, disappointingly closed, and the temperature gauge read one hundred and four degrees.
Scully had her window cracked. Her hair had given up days ago, curling at her temples in the heat, and Mulder's gaze caught on it for a half-second before he looked back at the road. He had been doing a lot of that this week. Noticing things he had no operational need to notice and looking away slightly too late.
They passed the lake.
They passed it every day. It sat well off the road behind mesquite brush and dry grass, visible only as a silver glint if you were paying attention. Mulder had been paying attention since Monday.
He slowed the car.
"Mulder." The specific, patient warning of a woman who had learned to read his deceleration.
"Mm."
"We have a six o'clock flight."
"We do," he agreed, and turned off the road.
The Taurus lurched over dry grass and rock. Scully grabbed the door handle.
"What are you doing? Where are we going?"
"It's a surprise."
"I hate surprises."
"You don't hate this one."
She gave him a look that reserved judgment. He kept driving.
The brush broke open and the lake appeared, a hidden, sapphire eye in a big empty field, ringed by cottonwoods, surface impossibly still.
He put the car in park.
"Oh," said Scully.
"Yeah."
She looked at it. He looked at her looking at it, her face doing something open and unguarded that it rarely got to do anywhere they'd been lately. The specific softness of her when her guard came down was something he had been cataloguing for six years without meaning to, filed under things he had no business keeping and couldn't make himself throw away.
They got out.
The heat was a physical weight. Mulder's shirt sleeves were rolled to his elbows, collar open two buttons. He looked like a man who had lost an argument with the climate, which was accurate.
He looked at her across the roof of the car.
"Hey, Scully. What do you say we cool off?"
She looked at the lake. She looked at him. One eyebrow made the journey north. It said you cannot be serious. It said we are federal agents. It said… keep talking.
"I promise not to peek," he said. "Eagle Scout's honor."
"I thought you were an Indian Guide."
The laugh came before he could stop it. "Indian Guide's honor, then. Scout's honor, Guide's honor, whatever honor is applicable. I will not look."
"You say that," she said, "and yet your track record on not looking at things you've been specifically told not to look at is, statistically speaking, not encouraging."
He put a hand to his chest. "I'm wounded."
"You're fine." But the corner of her mouth moved.
She pressed her lips together, but the amusement was already winning.
"Turn around," she said.
"Already turned."
He listened to her shoes hit the dry grass. The quiet of someone working through buttons, unhurried, the last-day looseness in it. He kept his eyes on the middle distance.
The sound of her zipper was not helpful.
He was mostly successful at not thinking about it.
He heard the water take her in, the sharp intake of breath at the cold, the clean submersion, the surface breaking as she came up.
He turned around.
She was waist-deep and wet, red hair darkened and slicked back, water tracking down her collarbones and shoulders in the afternoon light. She wore a cream-colored bra, the fabric close enough to her skin that the sunlight and water, for one breathless second, tricked him entirely.
He stood on the bank two seconds longer than necessary.
It lived in him like a low frequency, this feeling. Most of the time ignorable. Today, on the last day of a punishment case in Texas, it was not ignorable at all.
He kicked off his shoes.
He had just surfaced, shaking water from his eyes, when she splashed him. Hard. Direct hit.
He emerged blinking.
She was four feet away, shoulders shaking, one hand pressed to her mouth doing absolutely nothing to contain the laughter.
He was, not for the first time, absolutely gone on this woman.
"You promised," he said, with great dignity.
"I promised?" she managed. "I made no representations about water."
"The spirit of the agreement clearly covered—"
"The spirit of the agreement," she said, laughter still in her voice, "was that you would not look. You looked."
A beat. "Briefly."
"Mulder."
"Half a second. Tops."
"You stood on the bank for a full—"
He lunged. She bolted, fast, laughing, a streak of pale limbs through the blue, and he caught her wrist. The momentum brought them together, chest-deep, the water pressing them closer with an agenda of its own.
Her free hand was flat on his chest. Neither of them mentioned it.
She was still smiling, slightly breathless, water in her eyelashes. A single drop tracked down her collarbone to the hollow of her throat and his gaze followed it before he could stop himself.
This was the thing. Not the manhunts, not the hospitals, not the times everything had nearly ended. It was this that got him every time. Scully laughing. Scully's wet eyelashes on a Tuesday afternoon. All her formidable composure temporarily offline.
"Okay," he said, and let go of her wrist.
"Okay," she agreed. Neither of them moved.
Her hand was still on his chest. She took it back slowly, like she was making a conscious decision about it.
The water moved around them, easy and slow.
The silence settled. Scully was not uncomfortable in silence. He had learned to read hers the way you learn to read weather.
This one was thinking.
"Dale Pruett," she said finally. Clinically. "He destroyed thirty thousand dollars of livestock over a thirty-year grievance about a property line."
"Classic Texas behavior."
"He is not a complicated man."
"No." Mulder tilted his head back, water at his jaw. "Although."
She looked at him. Go on. I'll tell you if you're wrong.
She had moved to stand beside him now, both of them facing the cottonwoods. She was doing that thing she sometimes did in the field, thinking out loud in his direction, letting him be the surface she worked problems against. He had always loved that about her. That she thought alongside him. That her mind moved like that, quick and clean and willing.
"Jung would have had a field day with Dale Pruett. The shadow doesn't require a complicated man. Sometimes it requires a very simple one."
She considered whether to engage or deflect. She engaged. "The shadow being the repressed material. Everything Pruett couldn't acknowledge externalized onto Hendricks and his land."
"Thirty years of telling himself everyone was wrong except Dale Pruett. You know what lives in that much denial?"
"Apparently, bovine homicide."
He laughed. She allowed herself a small smile.
"But you're right about the mechanism," she said, the register she used when something had caught her interest against her better judgment. "The shadow accumulates. Everything you exile from your self-image doesn't disappear. It just goes underground."
"And then it comes out sideways."
"In the middle of the night," she said. "With a machete."
"Which is how most repressed material announces itself."
She was quiet a moment.
"Jung's argument is that integration is the work," she said. "You don't eliminate the shadow, you can't, you acknowledge it. Bring it into consciousness so it stops running you from underneath."
"You think we do that? Integrate?"
She considered. "I think you have an unusual relationship with your shadow."
"Meaning?"
She looked at him directly. When Scully looked at him rather than alongside him, it tended to mean something. Her expression was the careful, precise one she used for difficult diagnoses, the one that meant she was about to tell him something true that he might not want to hear, and she was going to tell him anyway because the facts deserved that.
"You've made your obsession conscious. Your sister, the work, the need to find the thing no one else will look for, you've named it. Most people never do." A pause. "The question is whether naming it is the same as integrating it."
"You think I'm still being run from underneath."
"I think," she said, "that you are sometimes more comfortable with the wound than with the possibility of its absence. The search is who you are. I wonder what you believe is left if it resolves."
He would be thinking about that at three in the morning for the next two weeks.
"That's probably the most unsettling thing anyone has ever said to me," he said. "And I once nearly drowned in the Bermuda Triangle after being transported back to 1939 aboard a ghost ship full of Nazis."
A reluctant smile. "At least that situation had a clear objective."
"Stay alive. Get home. Avoid getting shot."
"Self-examination is rarely that straightforward."
"No. Apparently the real danger is discovering why you keep making the same mistakes." His gaze drifted to hers. "What about you?"
"What about me?"
"Your shadow. The great Dana Katherine Scully. Quantify, categorize, classify, dismiss. What lives underneath all that order?"
The silence that followed had a different texture.
"I think," she said, "that I am a person who wants very badly to believe."
He went still.
"Not in extraterrestrial life specifically," she said, with a look that preempted his expression. "Don't. I mean… in things. In outcomes. In the possibility that the evidence might, occasionally, point somewhere extraordinary." She looked at the water. "I became a scientist because I love empiricism. I do. But if I'm honest, I also built that framework because it gave me permission not to hope too much. If you require proof, you can't be accused of faith."
"And faith is dangerous," Mulder said.
"Faith is my shadow. The thing I have the most of and work hardest to contain." A beat. "Because hope without evidence has, historically, caused me a great deal of trouble."
The word hope sat between them.
"Pete actually said something like that to me recently," Scully said. "That I hold people at the same distance I hold a hypothesis. Clinically. Like the verdict is always still out."
"Who's Pete?"
A barely perceptible reorganization of her composure. She was choosing her words.
"He's a pediatrician," she said carefully. "From my mother's church. She set us up." A pause doing considerable work. "We've had dinner a couple of times."
The water moved.
"Hmmm," Mulder said, in a tone of such studied neutrality it should have qualified as evidence of something. He was aware, with a clarity that arrived like a cold hand around his throat, of exactly what was happening in his chest right now.
A pediatrician. From Margaret Scully's church.
"He sounds very—" Mulder started.
"He's kind," Scully said, which was not what Mulder had been about to say. "And he reads. He thinks the work I do is interesting, even though he doesn't fully understand it." She was looking at the water, not at him. "He's normal, Mulder. Reliably, uncomplicatedly normal."
Pete the pediatrician, presumably, came home at a reasonable hour.
Pete the pediatrician had presumably never outside Mulder's apartment, his mouth two inches from hers.
Mulder thought about that hallway with a frequency that a reasonable person would find alarming.
"That's good," Mulder said. The words came out more clipped than he intended. "That's really good, Scully."
She glanced at him. Brief. Unreadable.
"You're doing the thing," she said.
He kept his face neutral. "What thing?"
"The thing where your voice goes very flat and agreeable because you are not, in fact, agreeable."
"I don't have a thing."
"You have several things, Mulder. That's one of them."
He looked out at the water. "I'm expressing genuine support for your personal life."
"You're expressing," she said precisely, "something. I'm not sure support is the word."
He had no response to that, which was how she always won.
She was quiet a moment. Then, with the slightly careful tone of someone recounting something they have rehearsed without meaning to:
"My mother has been on a campaign." She said it lightly, but her eyes stayed on the water. "For about a year now. She calls and the first ten minutes are fine, how's work, how am I eating and then she gets to it." A small pause. "She says, Dana, you give everything to that job. There has to be something left for you. She says it like the job and a life are mutually exclusive." Another pause, smaller. "She means well."
"What do you tell her?"
"I tell her I'm fine." The corner of her mouth moved, not quite a smile. "She doesn't believe me. She met Pete at some church event in February and apparently decided that was that. She called me the next week and said, He's a good man, Dana. Stable. Kind. He actually sleeps at night." She glanced at him sideways.
"Your mother is a perceptive woman."
"She said—" Scully stopped. Started again. "She said, You deserve someone who shows up, Dana. Not someone you have to decode."
The water was very still.
Maggie Scully was saying that her daughter was in love with someone she couldn't reach. He heard that clearly. He had known it for some time. He had been doing nothing about it and calling that nothing by different names depending on the day: restraint, consideration, protection. He was becoming less and less convinced by any of them.
"She's not wrong," Scully said quietly. "About deserving it. She's just… she doesn't understand what we—" She stopped again, and the unfinished sentence was its own kind of statement. "She doesn't see what I see every day. She sees her daughter who doesn't come home for holidays and doesn't return calls and is alone, and she's trying to fix it the only way she knows how."
"Is she fixing it?" Mulder asked. His voice was even. His jaw was not.
Scully was quiet for a long moment.
"He also said," she continued, "that I argue like someone who's afraid of being wrong. Not about the facts, about anything that actually matters." A small pause. "He said it kindly. He was trying to be perceptive."
"Was he right?"
"He wasn't wrong," she said. "He just didn't know that I'd spent five years arguing with someone who is almost never right about the facts and yet somehow—" She stopped.
"Somehow?" Mulder said, quietly.
She looked at him then. Really looked at him.
"Somehow makes it feel like the most worthwhile argument I've ever been in," she said.
The thing in his chest did something complicated.
She looked away first.
"Jung also said," he offered, and the careful lightness cost him something, "that the shadow contains the unlived life. Everything you might have been. Everything you haven't let yourself be yet."
Scully held the phrase the way she held things she intended to keep.
"The unlived life," she repeated.
"Yeah."
She held his gaze one beat longer than necessary, then looked out at the cottonwoods.
"I think," she said, "that is the most unsettling thing anyone has ever said to me."
"Worse than the ghost ship?"
"Your ghost ship did not imply failing to fully inhabit your own existence."
"Nearly drowning was honestly not very philosophical."
"No," she agreed. Quietly, so he almost missed it: "It wasn't."
She said it with a weight that had nothing to do with the Bermuda Triangle, and everything to do with the fact that he'd told her he loved her in a hospital hallway and she'd let him believe he didn't remember saying it. They both knew that. Neither of them had ever said so.
"You know," Mulder said, "for the record. You were right about this assignment."
"I'm listening."
"It was a punishment. Kersh put us here because he could. The case was beneath both of us, the department treated us like jokes, and it was hot enough to qualify as a war crime."
"Yes. All of that is correct. I'm glad you've come around."
"I'm just saying." He looked at the cottonwoods, the still water, the way the late afternoon light was doing something generous to all of it. "I've had worse punishments."
When he looked back, she was already looking at him. The calculation from earlier was happening again behind her eyes, quieter this time.
She reached out and splashed him.
Much more gently. A stalling tactic. He let it land. He didn't retaliate. He just looked at her.
"What?" she said.
"Nothing." He kept looking.
"Mulder."
"I'm forming a hypothesis."
She raised an eyebrow. "About what?"
He held her gaze one beat too long. "I'll tell you when I have sufficient evidence."
Her lips pressed together, the tell he'd catalogued years ago. Deciding whether to laugh or retreat.
He looked at her standing in the shifting silver light, and made a decision. He thought about the hallway outside his apartment, that paralyzed, stolen moment.
"Scully."
Just her name. He said it the way he sometimes said it when there was nothing else left, stripped of the deflection and humor. He said it like it was the only word he actually needed.
He closed the distance slowly. He had spent a long time being careful around her, building elaborate architectures of almost and nearly and not yet, and he was done with the architecture.
She watched him come. She didn't move.
He raised his hand and brushed a wet curl back from her temple, his fingers barely there, like she was something he was still asking permission for. He let his knuckles trace the line of her jaw. Felt the pulse jumping in her throat: rapid, honest, completely undisguised.
She had a very high tolerance for disguise. She was not disguising this.
The lake held them both, unhurried. The late afternoon light had gone the color of honey.
"I don't want to be an argument," he said, his thumb resting against her jaw. "And I definitely don't want to be the wound." He looked at her, really looked at her, the way he only let himself look when she wasn't going to catch him doing it, except now she was, and he was doing it anyway.
"I have been very carefully deciding, for six years, that you deserve better than me," he said, the words slipping out rough and stripped of any defense. "I have been making that decision quietly, on your behalf, without asking you. And I think that might be the most cowardly thing I have ever done."
Her breath caught in her throat—a small, fractured sound that seemed to pull the air right out of his lungs.
"But if the alternative," he continued, his voice dropping to a desperate whisper, "is you going home to someone who is reliably, uncomplicatedly normal—" A muscle jumped in his jaw. "Someone who takes you to dinner and asks perceptive questions and has never once dragged you to Brewster County, Texas in July—" He swallowed. "I'm finding I have a very low tolerance for it."
"Pete," she said, her voice carefully even, "is a perfectly nice man."
"I know," Mulder said. "That's the problem."
Something in her face changed.
"I didn't say I was going to keep having dinner with him, Mulder."
His thumb stilled against her jaw. "No?"
"No." The corner of her mouth moved, that small, real, private smile. "Pete is kind. But if I'm perfectly honest—" She held his gaze with the particular blue directness that had always, always undone him. "He's a little boring."
The sound that came out of him was not dignified. Half-laugh, half six years of pressure releasing through a very small valve. "Is he now."
"I find," she said, and her voice had dropped to something that was doing remarkable things to his ability to think, "that I prefer my men a little more... exotic."
"I have been told I possess a certain extraterrestrial appeal."
"Shut up, Mulder," she whispered.
She closed the final inch.
The kiss was soft, at first, a question after a very long silence, tentative.
He brought both hands up to her face. Just holding her there. His thumbs traced her cheekbones. He felt her exhale against his mouth, a long, slow release of something she had been carrying.
She made a sound against him, small and unguarded, barely there, and it went through him like a current.
"He kissed her the way he had wanted to in that hallway outside his apartment, the one he had replayed so many times it had become a kind of private mythology, the moment that didn't happen, the door that didn't open. He kissed her with his whole attention and both hands and nothing held back.
She kissed him back the way she did everything, precisely, completely, with her whole self committed to the thing once she committed. Her hands had found his chest, his shoulders, the back of his neck, and she was not letting go, and the lake moved around them like it had been waiting patiently for this exact outcome and was pleased.
When they finally broke apart, they didn't go far. Her forehead came to rest against his jaw, her eyes closed, her breathing unsteady. He kept his hands where they were, her face, her wet hair, the curve of her skull.
The afternoon was very quiet.
He pressed his lips to her temple. Held them there, not a kiss exactly, more like a statement. Like he was putting something in writing.
Then, because he was who he was and she would expect nothing less:
"For what it's worth," he said into her wet hair, "I'm putting the lake in my report."
The laugh came from somewhere deep in her chest and she pressed her face further into him like she was trying to hide it.
"You are not putting the lake in your report, Mulder."
"Undisclosed body of water," he murmured, pressing a kiss to her temple. Then her cheekbone, slow, deliberate, making up for six years of not doing this. The corner of her jaw. The soft skin just below her ear, where her pulse was still unsteady. "Profound investigative potential. Highly recommend follow-up."
She tilted her head, giving him access involuntarily.
"We're going to miss our flight," she said. Her voice had gone soft around the edges.
"Yeah," he agreed.
He kissed her again, unhurried, his hands still in her hair. His hands moved slowly, learning the shape of her in the water, fingertips tracing down from her hair to the nape of her neck, feeling the warmth of her skin against the cold of the lake, that specific, electric contrast. His arms found their way around her without any decision being made, one hand flat against her back, feeling the shift of her breathing. She leaned into him completely, the subtle expansion of her ribs against his palm. This was Dana Scully and she was holding onto him like she meant it, and he felt that in every part of himself that had ever doubted it was possible. Her thumbs traced slow arcs along the base of his skull. He felt it travel the length of his spine.
He pulled back just enough to look at her. Her eyes opened, that particular blue, darker now, the afternoon in them and she looked back at him.
"Hey," she said softly.
He realized he had been looking at her for a long moment without speaking. "Hey."
Her smile was small and warm and entirely private, a smile he was fairly certain had never been directed at a case file or a colleague or Pete the pediatrician. A smile that had his name on it.
He held her there in the late afternoon light and felt grateful. Purely, simply grateful. For the improbable grace of this moment. For the way she fit against him like the universe had been quietly arranging for exactly this without telling either of them. Her smile was against his mouth and her hands were at the back of his neck and the light was doing something extraordinary on the water and the world was, right now, in this exact moment, entirely and perfectly enough.
This is what lives on the other side of the unlived life.
The Texas heat pressed down around them, and the lake held them like it had all the time in the world.
They missed the flight.